A recent post on the astrobites website summarized an interesting paper that called for the search of Self-Replicating Probes (SRPs). They state that it is puzzling we haven’t found evidence of intelligent life yet, but even more so that it hasn’t found us.

An SRP has 2 purposes: explore & reproduce. Using the resources in a star system to reproduce, a new probe would travel to another system while one would remain to explore. Calculations show there should be 100 to 100^9 SRPs in our Solar System (SS). We haven’t detected them yet because they are just too small [the Hubble Space Telescope can’t even see landing gear on the Moon!].

Therefore, if our Galaxy does harbour ET intelligence, our SS is the first place to look!

[The paper can be found here: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2011arXiv1111.6131W]

Neil deGrasse Tyson’s (host of NOVA ScienceNOW) opinion on intelligent life [the 2-min mark is where the fun starts]LINK: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxfJfv9tirU

Also see http://www.astronomynow.com/news/n1111/08SETI/ for ways we could detect lights from an alien civilization.